Download or read book Wit written by Margaret Edson and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Oppenheimer Award. Adapted to an Emmy Award-winning television movie, directed by Mike Nichols, starring Emma Thompson. Margaret Edson's powerfully imagined Pulitzer Prize–winning play examines what makes life worth living through her exploration of one of existence's unifying experiences—mortality—while she also probes the vital importance of human relationships. What we as her audience take away from this remarkable drama is a keener sense that, while death is real and unavoidable, our lives are ours to cherish or throw away—a lesson that can be both uplifting and redemptive. As the playwright herself puts it, "The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It's about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It's about compassion, but it shows insensitivity." In Wit, Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end? The immediacy of the presentation, and the clarity and elegance of Edson's writing, make this sophisticated, multilayered play accessible to almost any interested reader. As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.

Download or read book The Book of Will written by Lauren Gunderson and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2018-06-18 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Without William Shakespeare, we wouldn’t have literary masterpieces like Romeo and Juliet. But without Henry Condell and John Heminges, we would have lost half of Shakespeare’s plays forever! After the death of their friend and mentor, the two actors are determined to compile the First Folio and preserve the words that shaped their lives. They’ll just have to borrow, beg, and band together to get it done. Amidst the noise and color of Elizabethan London, THE BOOK OF WILL finds an unforgettable true story of love, loss, and laughter, and sheds new light on a man you may think you know.

Download or read book This Wide Night written by Chloë Moss and published by NHB Modern Plays. This book was released on 2008 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staged by Clean Break, leading theatre company working with women prisoners.

Download or read book Teenage Dick written by Mike Lew and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2019 with total page 67 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant retelling of Shakespeare’s Richard III, one of the most famous disabled characters in history is reimagined as a 16-year-old outsider taking on the political turmoil of high school. Bullied for his cerebral palsy (and his sometimes disturbing tendency to speak with a Shakespearean affect), Richard plots his revenge…as well as his glorious path to the senior class presidency. But as he falls deeper into a pattern of manipulation and greed, Richard is faced with an unexpected choice: Is it better to be feared or loved? TEENAGE DICK is a hilarious and sharp-witted adaptation about perception, disability, and the treacherous road to ascendancy.

Download or read book The Wit of Oscar Wilde written by Oscar Wilde and published by Barnes & Noble Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oscar Wilde is one of the most quoted and quotable men in history. He once boasted that he could talk spontaneously on any subject, a claim effortlessly borne out by the range and scope of the examples collected in this book. It is an entertaining, instructive, and revealing look at a man who is unlikely ever to be forgotten. "Oscar Wilde," wrote Richard Ellmann, "we have only to hear the great name to anticipate that what will be quoted as his will surprise and delight us. His wit is an agent of renewal, as pertinent now as a hundred years ago."

Download or read book The Theatre written by and published by . This book was released on 1889 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Theatrical Professoriate written by Emily Roxworthy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that today’s professoriate has become increasingly theatrical, largely as a result of neoliberal policies in higher education, but also in response to an anti-intellectual scrutiny that has become pervasive throughout the Western world. The Theatrical Professoriate: Contemporary Higher Education and Its Academic Dramas examines how the Western professoriate increasingly finds itself enacting command performances that utilize scripting, characterization, surrogation, and spectacle—the hallmarks of theatricality—toward neoliberal ends. Roxworthy explores how the theatrical nature of today’s professoriate and the resultant glut of performances about academia on stage and screen have contributed to a highly ambivalent public fascination with academia. She further documents the "theatrical turn" witnessed in American higher education, as academic institutions use performance to intervene in the diversity issues and disciplinary disparities fueled by neoliberalism. By analyzing academic dramas and their audience reception alongside theoretical approaches, the author reveals how contemporary academia drives the professoriate to perform in what seem like increasingly artificial ways. Ideal for practitioners and students of education, ethnic, and science studies, The Theatrical Professoriate deftly intervenes in Performance Studies’ still-unsettled debates over the differential impact of live versus mediated performances.

Download or read book The Theatre Annual written by and published by . This book was released on 1884 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Wit s Pilgrimage written by Darryll Grantley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2000: England experienced something of a social revolution in the years from the early 16th century to the Civil War. This work seeks to add a new dimension to the discussion of this phenomena by focusing on the emerging role and function of social behaviour as a means of signalling social identity and rank. Noting the even greater emphasis placed on manners, customs and ordinary behaviour during that time period, Darryll Grantley demonstrates the interrelation of two key elements - education and drama - in the reconstruction of social identity. By examining the relationship between education and drama, Grantley contributes important perspectives on the ways in which drama functioned in society. He explores education as a prominent motif in the aristocratically patronized drama of the 16th century; the contribution of the academy to the evolution of public modes of drama; education and the playwrights; education and the audience; and the representations of learning and social behaviour on the public stage. Throughout, the study explores the increasing social significance of education in 16th- and 17th-century England, and the reflection of that cultural change in the drama of the period.

Download or read book Emily Mann written by Alexis Greene and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater is the story of a remarkable American playwright, director, and artistic director. It is the story of a woman who defied the American theater's sexism, a traumatic assault, and illness to create unique documentary plays and to lead the McCarter Theatre Center, for thirty seasons, to a place of national recognition. The book traces and describes Emily Mann's family life; her coming-of-age in Chicago during the exuberant, rebellious, and often violent 1960s; how sexual violence touched her personally; and how she fell in love with theater and began learning her craft at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while a student at Radcliffe. Mann's evolution as a professional director and playwright is explored, first at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where she received an MFA from the University of Minnesota, then on and off Broadway and at regional theaters. Mann's leadership of the McCarter is examined, along with her battles to overcome multiple sclerosis and to conquer—personally and artistically—the memories of the violence she experienced when a teenager. Finally, the book discusses her retirement from the McCarter, while amplifying her ongoing journey as a theater artist of sensitivity and originality. Mann's many awards include the 2015 Margo Jones Award, the 2019 Visionary Leadership Award from Theatre Communications Group, and the 2020 Lilly Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2019, she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame for Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater.

Download or read book The New Sincerity written by Alena Smith and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: Rose Spencer has just achieved the ultimate young-intellectual’s dream: becoming a staff writer for a prestigious New York literary/criticism journal. And her editor, the smart and attractively cynical Benjamin, is definitely flirting with her—while also respecting her writing. With the sudden rise of an Occupy-style political movement in a public park right outside the journal’s offices, Rose sees a way to participate in what may be the defining activist movement for her generation, but too quickly she must learn to recognize the difference between sincere action and skillful self-promotion.

Download or read book Joe Papp An American Life written by Helen Epstein and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 755 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Papp (1921-1991), theater producer, champion of human rights and of the First Amendment, founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and Public Theater, changed the American cultural landscape. Born Yussel Papirofsky in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he discovered Shakespeare in public school and first produced a show on an aircraft carrier during World War II. After a stint at the Actors’ Lab in Hollywood, he moved to New York, where he worked as a CBS stage manager during the golden age of television. He fought Parks Commissioner Robert Moses (as well as Mayors Wagner, Lindsay, Beame and Koch) winning first the right to stage free Shakespeare in New York’s Central Park, then municipal funding to keep it going. He built the Delacorte Theater and later rebuilt the former Astor Library on Lafayette Street, transforming it into the Public Theater. In addition to helping create an "American" style of Shakespeare, Papp pioneered colorblind casting and theater as a not-for-profit institution. He showcased playwrights David Rabe, Elizabeth Swados, Ntozake Shange, David Hare, Wallace Shawn, John Guare, and Vaclav Havel; directors Michael Bennett, Wilford Leach and James Lapine; actors Al Pacino, Colleen Dewhurst, George C. Scott, James Earl Jones, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Sam Waterston, and Denzel Washington; and produced Hair, Sticks and Bones, for colored girls, The Normal Heart, and A Chorus Line, the longest running musical in Broadway history. "This first biography of the late Joseph Papp will be a hard act to follow." — Booklist "The final portrait that emerges might have been jointly painted by Goya, Whistler and Francis Bacon." — Benedict Nightingale, front-page New York Times Sunday Book Review Playwright Tony Kushner called Papp "one of the very few heroes this tawdry, timid business has produced" and the book, a "nourishing and juicy biography." "Helen Epstein recounts [Papp's] career in [this] definitive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography. [...] It is a tribute to Epstein’s narrative skill that the detailed account of Papp’s decline and eventual defeat by cancer [...] reads as both riveting and horrifying." — Ellen Schiff, All About Jewish Theatre Oklahoma-born Paul Davis created 51 iconic posters for Joseph Papp, starting in 1975 with the New York Shakespeare Festival production of "Hamlet" starring Sam Waterston. "It was inspiring to work with Joe," says Davis. "We would discuss what he wanted to achieve in a production, and he trusted me to find a way to express it. And he respected the poster as its own dramatic form." The artist’s work has been exhibited in the U.S., Europe and Japan. He is a recipient of a special Drama Desk award created for his theater art. Davis was elected to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame, and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

Download or read book On the Art of the Theatre written by Edward Gordon Craig and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1911, On the Art of the Theatre remains one of the seminal texts of theatre theory and practice. Actor, director, designer and pioneering theorist, Edward Gordon Craig was one of twentieth century theatre’s great modernisers. Here, he is eloquent and entertaining in expounding his views on the theatre; a crucial and prescient contribution that retains its relevance almost a century later. This reissue contains a wealth of new features: a specially written Introduction and notes from editor Franc Chamberlain an updated bibliography further reading. Controversial and original, On the Art of the Theatre stands as one of the most influential books on theatre of the twentieth century.

Download or read book The New English Theatre written by and published by . This book was released on 1787 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Restoration Theatre written by Montague Summers and published by Dalcassian Publishing Company. This book was released on 1934-01-01 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A New Theatrical Dictionary written by DICTIONARY. and published by . This book was released on 1792 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The London Theatre written by Thomas Dibdin and published by . This book was released on 1818 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: